The king genuinely sees it as his duty to protect his people

>The king genuinely sees it as his duty to protect his people
>The nobles, though a little corrupt, don't go around kicking puppies and openly exploiting the peasantry
>Peasants and serfs, though burdened under heavy labor, are overall happy and can afford at least two meals per day
>Villages are cozy with a tight, interconnected community where most people know eachother by name
>Cities are alive and bustling, free of fear unless they're located on the frontier (and even there daily life goes on mostly undisturbed)
>The guards are at best friendly and willing to help lost strangers and at worst skeptical of heavily armed murderhobos walking around in their peaceful cities
>Innkeepers pride themselves on having clean establishments, good meals and quality entertainment
>The clergy, though withdrawn from daily life, regularly aid the least fortunate in society

I can't be the only one who unironically enjoys this kind of setting without some grimdark "twist" to it, right?

It'd be fucking refreshing, I can say that much

>but everything is only this good because one day per year all laws are lifted and anyone can kill anyone they like

>Not buying a vacation home in Canada or Mexico and moving there once per year

Get your feudalistic magical realm outta here.

I have the strangest boner.

I like settings that focus on how even imperfect systems work for people, if they endure, and allow people to be dependent on each other.

The farmers must be protected or everyone's going to starve. The warriors have to be fed or everyone gets robbed, enslaved or killed. Everyone has a place and all of them are important. People might not be overjoyed about their part in the system, but they will get used to it and find what happiness they can.

You're obviously not the only one, but settings like that are lacking in tension and as such, are boring. It's unrealistic to have a completely grimdark world where everything is shit all the time, but it's equally unrealistic to have a world where everyone is happy and everything is great. A healthy medium is what people should be aiming for.

Nope.
The majority of the primary country in my setting is like that:
>The corrupt Lord or religious leader is the exception to the rule.
>There is a budding middle class.
>Oppression is something that happens in other nations.
>Everyone wishes they were richer and better off, but they still remember the stories of harsher days.
I prefer a nation in a stable, peaceful state that needs protection from encroaching evil, rather than a rotten land better abandoned or murderhoboed through.

That's the kind of setting I want to make, but everyone has a natural 'Resist Death' bonus so slitting throats, poisons, shots and light wounds aren't so deadly.

Basically making HP real and over the top honourable combat is the norm.

You don't need a medium between the op and grimdark, you just need a source of tension. A budding demon nation, monsters in the frontier, ancient dungeons filled with leftover power of a long lost empire, a knight of royal blood that wants to be acknowledged by dad.

This

Cease this subtle saberposting at once.

>Implying the king understands human feelings
You probably could've chosen a better image, OP.

While that's a pretty cozy setting that I honestly don't mind much, for actual games I prefer the more crapsack postapocalyptic near-anarchy stuff that's typical in older D&D and whatsit - there's more opportunities for actual adventure if there's a lot of bad stuff going on that you can right. Your setting seems pretty stable, which is great for more slice-of-life stuff but impedes a bit on player agency for the more adventurous sorts.

Basically, I personally find there to be more adventure in Ankh-Morpork than in the Shire. A hive of scum and villainy is unpleasant to live within, but has a ton of chances for unpredictable and varied interactions for the PCs. (Also, the less stable the setting is the less the law covers stuff, which means the PCs have freer range.)
A king who doesn't protect the people means there's more opportunities for the PCs to protect the people, corrupt nobles mean the PCs can dethrone them, scummy cities mean the PCs have an easier time lying and thieving if that's what they're into, the clergy regularly aiding the less fortunate means there's less chance for the PC Cleric to distinguish themselves by doing just that, etc. etc.

Your setting would probably be excellent for a different type of game than the ones I'm typically into, though.

>This idiot drawing attention to it, rather than ignoring it like the rest of it.

I personally like doing this, but very rarely or very carefully because the moment where my PCs enter a place that isn't "YouDon'tWantToBeHere; Population: Just Enough" they immediately get suspicious and paranoid.

>An eruption reveals a path to a new land, which becomes a frontier
>but evil lurks...
There, done.

She's a king, not your waifu.

There's still conflict, it's just not horrible conflict 24/7 shitfest.

What in my post suggested that I thought she was?

>The religious "Human Supremacy" guys are not actually the bad guys
>The higher-ups are using this whole thing to build their national power
>There exists a few nations of powerful and horrible monsters who see humans as a slaves at best, food source and toys at worst
>The helped to create the kingdom on the most geographically safest land, so it could grow strong and save humanity
>Also created it in order to not share border with the nation of friendly demi-humans and fight unnecessary war with them
I have no idea why i like this sort of thing.

It's more or less actual realistic middle ages for the most part. The grimdark was the exception and all too noteworthy for it.

...

>plot involves the demi humans and humans forging an alliance to repel their corruption

Humans, elves, goblins and more coexist.

>goblins
[Autistic screeching]

Wars are a series of direct combat skirmishes fought between small numbers of elite soldiers with few casualties.

So Warcraft? Even the faction's edgelords (death knights) are just chill duded that help other people.

>goblins
REMOVE

People almost invariably survive being defeated. A days rest is all that's needed most of the time but can survive for weeks with proper tending if they need a doctor or cleric, depending on the damage.

Grobi genocide best day of my life

Quite nice setting, but it would work mostly for those of mildly criminal type PCs, like thiefs.
You know, you go rob mansions and stuff without murderhoboing.

one day

when we are all more wise and mature

>lacking tension

POLITICS, SON

THE AFFERBURG CLAN HAS A CENTURIES OLD FUED WITH THE DONALLIES, EVEN THOUGH THEY BOTH SERVE THE SAME SOVEREIGN NOW, 247 YEARS AGO THEY WERE SEPERATE CITY STATES WHO WAGED WAR OFTEN

The reason for that is Undead.
You see, the big numbers of dead create the disbalance between the planes of negative and postive energy.
Meaning, the big battlefield will turn into a cursed land, which spawns undead. The more undead spawns in one place, the more stronger undead are going to spawn in the future.
This is why all cemeteries are protected by walls and all wars are the gentlemen agreements you described.

If armies weren't such bunches of assholes, then medieval times would be one of the comfiest
>peasants didn't give a fuck about national identify
>small drive to join the army besides money if brave
>in best case it would be just battles between elite knights, while peasants just work for whoever took over the territory, because no fucks given about what country you belong to
>no repression just because they're French or German. As long nobles can communicate with peasants, goods will flow

>Wars are all just competitions where the advanced nations compete to see who's army can kill the most local barbarian tribesmen in a given timelimit.
>Neither side ever sustains a casualty and diplomatic agreements are signed afterwards.

>live comfy peasant life without mercenaries or starved soldiers razing your shit
>die of dysentery, malnutrition or overwork anyway
Good times

What if they run out of barbarians?

>dysentery, malnutrition or overwork
Shit nobles

That sounds extremely brutal and dehumanizing. I like it.

The barbarian population is carefully managed by the medieval EPA and captive bred barbarians will be released into the wild in a time of need.

See

Wasn't that an episode in Kino's Journey

Could this thing even fly?

weirder looking planes have flew

Yes

>Peasants and serfs, though burdened under heavy labor, are overall happy and can afford at least two meals per day
Nothing worse than this. Or most interpretations of the feudal laboring class and economy.

First off:

>burdened under heavy labor

This is a meme. Peasants were fucking freeloading shits that only worked one in five days out of the year, and they worked at their own pace, without any supervision.

Second:

>afford at least two meals per day

The medieval economy, by necessity, is not commercialized. Money is not used in the vast majority of transactions. Peasants in particular DID NOT WORK FOR MONEY. The class of people who lived on an income of money were the tiny population of urbanites. The vast majority of feudal societies are not involved in any meaningful sense of the economy. They participated only insofar as they paid up to feudal protectors, who then turned some of their rent of crops into cash.

The economy of money, and in fact the whole economy of commerce, is, in a feudal society an extraneous tumor festering alongside it, not a part of it.

Of course this commercial economy of money, prosperity, and progress predates feudalism, because feudalism is itself perhaps the worst, most utility-destroying, anti-economy in human history, a consequence of illiterate barbarian warriors squatting on Roman factory farms and having no idea what to do with them.

I like settings like that too. I do enjoy the stereotypical 'grimdark' setting once in a while, but those get rather boring quickly.

My current setting is... well, neither, I suppose, because it doesn't take place in established civilisation, but rather in the wilderness; taiga, mostly. Very difficult to travel through, very poor soil so agriculture is difficult, so settlements are tiny and far apart. People who go there are either criminals, or the religiously/racially persecuted, or poor people who want to take their final chance to find a better life, or slavers, or other 'resource-gatherers' who know there's lots of riches in the wilderness that people back in the Empire would gladly pay for. It's a tough environment that attracts some weirdos, but also a lot of good folks who are simply looking to make a living in peace.

You're describing the vast majority of fantasy settings. The only reason this seems contrary is because people got bored of playing Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms/whatever.

>>The king genuinely sees it as his duty to protect his people
And yet he is so detached from his people, that when he hears that his people don't even have bread to eat, he just says "Let them eat cake."
>>The nobles, though a little corrupt, don't go around kicking puppies and openly exploiting the peasantry
Yet they are constantly at war with each other for petty reasons, and not afraid to throw away their servants' lives for their own protection.
>>Peasants and serfs, though burdened under heavy labor, are overall happy and can afford at least two meals per day
But if they decide to move to another land, under another noble, or become free, they constantly face artificially created obstacles. Not only there is no vertical mobility, but there is no horizontal mobility either - you are destined to spend your life as a bumfuck peasant working on specific land for a specific noble.
>Villages are cozy with a tight, interconnected community where most people know eachother by name
Yes, and when all strangers that come to that community strangely go missing. Because fuck "the others", amirite?
>>Cities are alive and bustling, free of fear unless they're located on the frontier (and even there daily life goes on mostly undisturbed)
Bustling with thievery, drug trade,prostitution alright, governed by the organized crime. There is always an opportunity for a profit to be made in the cities, but no one says said opportunity is moral or legal.
If you want an example of city, think of Khare, the Cityport of Traps. "Vik for the First Noble!" alright.
>>Innkeepers pride themselves on having clean establishments, good meals and quality entertainment
But everyone knows that the inn visitors have to pay for in blood - sometimes literally.
>The clergy, though withdrawn from daily life, regularly aid the least fortunate in society
Except the most popular religion is that of the malicious trickster god and their clergy hast their own concept of "helping" people.

Daddy Issue: cause for 50% of world's problem.

And Mommy issues are the other 50%. ;)

...

You just described my setting. Which is still grimdark, by the way.

>pointless contrarianism that only proves his point
fucking lel

It's not contrarianism.
I've just described the same fucking setting as he said, without "grimdark" twists. The only thing that changed is the depth of description.
All of the people still remain benevolent, but their ineptitude or vainglory or the relativity of their morality makes it so that no matter how benevolent they are, bad shit still happens.

>Peasants were fucking freeloading shits that only worked one in five days out of the year
From everything I've heard about farm work, this... doesn't seem right.

>without "grimdark" twists
>the most popular religion is that of the malicious trickster god
>their clergy hast their own concept of "helping" people.
>inn visitors have to pay for in blood
>all strangers that come to that community strangely go missing
>"Let them eat cake."

Your next line will be, "I was only pretending to be retarded".

Probably because the farmers of today are actually entrepreneurs invested in maximizing profits, and furthermore own truly vast tracts of land, and furthermore have to actually do a lot more shit in the process of raising and harvesting their crops. And even still, farm work is not hard work, nor continuous work, such as industrial and servile labors are.

Everyone rich enough would do that. But then everyone not rich enough would resent that, and burn their houses down. But then everyone rich enough to not want their house burnt down would install automated security devices, and now you've got a dungeon crawl.

>Not grimdark
Did you read the same post that you wrote?

There won't be much story left in the world if everyone is a competent parent.

>>"Let them eat cake."
What? You've never seen a person who doesn't understand that other people might be unable to eat cake when bread runs out? People leading different lifestyles tend to misunderstand each other's problems.
>>the most popular religion is that of the malicious trickster god
>>their clergy hast their own concept of "helping" people.
And? Their clergy is still trying to help people according to the tenets of their god. Just because the religion itself is flawed doesn't mean people are evil.
>>inn visitors have to pay for in blood
How else would such pristine inns be maintained? You are offering a quality luxurious service, it's only fair to demand quality luxurious payment. And not everyone can afford to pay for it. So...
>>all strangers that come to that community strangely go missing
Because otherwise strong tight-knit communities wouldn't be such. As soon as strangers start to come into the village, there are people fascinated by the exotic people, and stories and goods they bring. So they want to leave.
So if you want to have a truly tight-knit community, you have to isolate yourself from the outside world.

>All I did was add depth!
>By completely changing everything!

So, basically, agricultural work is only hellish/backbreaking for the laborers when they're working for someone else's profit as opposed to food for the realm alone? That... well, actually makes sense.

>without "grimdark" twists.

>Inns that require people to pay in LITERAL BLOOD aren't grimdark

You're a fucking retard.

The kind of agricultural labor that medieval peasants were doing is nowhere near hellish/backbreaking, it wasn't even time consuming.

>So if you want to have a truly tight-knit community, you have to isolate yourself from the outside world.
>My name is user and I don't understand how a feudal township works.

Nigger, a village in a feudal society would be a fucking spiderweb of family ties and most of the villagers would only ever travel as far as the neighboring town or trade center. For the village to function at all it would have to be a fairly tightly knit community since there's only going to be one hundred people or so.

The point I'm trying to make is that even if everyone is trying to play nice with each other, and turn the other cheek, there is always a (almost definite) possibility of "shit turning sour" by our modern society's standards.
There is no such thing as "grimdark". Even if no one is actively malicious, bad shit will happen.

Stop trying to act like paying in blood to stay at an inn or 'cozy towns that murder all visitors' are still somehow noblebright.

>Bad shit always happens.
That's literally grimdark, you're forcing this into being grimdark.

Maybe it's a difference in crops as well; I might have been thinking too much of American plantations and the like.

This, though since the feudal system was so fucking bad at allocating labor, you'd still have to spend a lot your time not spent farming doing odd job to keep everything in order, gather firewood, gather and cook your own food, mend and make clothes, that sort of bullshit.

Settings aren't reality, you don't need to point out that 'bad things happen'.

Of course bad things happen, that's conflict, that's how you get a game. But this thread is about focusing on stuff that hasn't gone bad.

>without "grimdark" twists
>But everyone knows that the inn visitors have to pay for in blood - sometimes literally.

>Settings aren't reality, you don't need to point out that 'bad things happen'.
And that's what I meant by "adding depth".
By making a setting more realistic, people are more inclined to immerse themselves in it.

Well yeah people got by just fine back then and wouldn't necessarily call their lives wretched on average, but their lives were far more brutal from an objective perspective. Their lives were hard as fuck, but everyone also had more community and purpose, and that can validate all forms of misery within one's life.

I've read up on soldiering from the early modern era (which is admittedly after the "middle ages") and man that life was fucking savage.

>plantation labor is backbreaking
Yet another myth of history. The reason slaves were imported to harvest crops in the US (and there weren't many, only about 400,000 slaves ever made it to American shores compared to the millions in the Caribbean and South America) was strictly due to a shortage in population. This is actually the same reason they were used in the Caribbean and South America, it's just that climate and disease killed people off a lot faster in those places as well.

In the American South the actual labor being done on plantations wasn't terribly difficult or time consuming, indeed the majority of the slave's time was spent tending to his own food crops and animals. That said, the farming done in the South by slaves was not peasant farming, obviously, nor was it the kind of farming that would have ever happened in a feudal society.

Now there are hard agricultural labors, sugarcane and chocolate/cacao harvesting being the chief ones, but those aren't peasant crops, nor are they even feudal crops.

You didn't make the setting more realistic, you just made it darker. Paying with your blood for a room at an inn isn't realistic at all. In reality, you just can't afford the room. A city run by organized crime, but that's still free of fear, is also unrealistic.

You're putting out edgy bullshit and treating it like it's depth, it isn't.

>Peasants were fucking freeloading shits that only worked one in five days out of the year, and they worked at their own pace, without any supervision.
I knew there were a lot of holy days (which happens when you have a saint for literally fucking everything), but working at their own pace? I don't have any sources but considering the lives of literally millions depended on having enough food harvested before winter comes, I doubt they were a bunch of lazy freeloaders working casually. Especially when they didn't have the technology of today to decide when they have "enough".

Okay, sure, you don't like the inns? Let's change it up a bit.
I mean, I wrote it without really thinking about it too much.
>>Innkeepers pride themselves on having clean establishments, good meals and quality entertainment
They have to pay cutthroat protection tax to the organized crime factions (read: local mafia) in order to enjoy providing quality service to its customers. And there are multiple competing factions that-- Well, yknow, mafia, basically, and all the both good and shitty parts that it entails.

Oh, and you don't want to know what happens to those who don't pay. It's a messy business.

>Your next line will be, "I was only pretending to be retarded".
You stole his move!
Well done!
His only choice was to double down on the Down Syndrome.

>I'm not grimdark, but those nice idyllic inns have to pay exorbitant protection fees.
Come the fuck on dude.

>more realistic
>By adding Hot Fuzz-tier mudercults to every village

You are quite possibly the most clueless poster on Veeky Forums right now.

>working at their own pace
Yes, as in, there was no one there to berate them for going slowly or doing things incorrectly or taking the day off.

> I don't have any sources but considering the lives of literally millions depended on having enough food harvested before winter comes
An incredibly simple job that had nothing to do with peasant motivation or responsibility. Peasants primarily fed themselves, not others. Cities fed themselves not with peasant crops, but via hinterland farms which were owned directly by urbanites, operated for profit, and worked by the dregs of urban society for wages.

Villages did not, for the most part, export goods in the medieval period. Excess production was actively destroyed by local clergy and nobility in the form of feast days, to prevent the development of a monied, landowning rural class.

What would you do? Invest in stable business and retire?

I get what you're saying

>farm work is not hard work
But fuck you

You might not believe that there is any reason farm work needs to be hard work, but that has shitall to do with reality.

Yes?

We playing Ryuutama now boy.

How else would they remain nice and idyllic?
Mafia protection still has its benefits of actually, yknow, protection. If you're gonna say to me that 1920s Chicago was "grimdark", then get the fuck out right now.

You are the one here talking about murder cults, not me.

It's called noblebright for a reason.

I like doing this with the standard ''adventurers guild'' JRPG shitstick, re-named ''kings guild'' due to private mercenary companies being banned and to make actual sense out of it as an employment office.

Nigger I'm from western Kansas, I grew up on and worked farms in the summer, I know it's 80% sitting around, 15% doing pointless patrols of the property, and 5% doing anything with crops.

>How else would they remain nice and idyllic?
By sweeping their floor, cleaning their tables, doing the dishes, and hiring competent help.

Like normal establishments in the service industry.

>Cities fed themselves not with peasant crops, but via hinterland farms which were owned directly by urbanites, operated for profit, and worked by the dregs of urban society for wages.
So in those farms there was a model where the workers of the land were expected to work hard and a have a certain turnover per [period] to feed everyone in the city, right? Or am I wrong here too?

And do you have some sources on this? It's interesting stuff.

Normal establisments that don't deal with giving sleeping arrangements to CN murderhobo adventurers such as your players, you mean?

>all farms are exactly like western Kansas

While I agree with your point about the difference between structured agricultural labor and the labor of feudal serfs.

I disagree about it just being a simple shortage of population. The south while in the early period much less populous than the north maintained a fairly good population, and until the mass importation of slaves it had an about even population with the laborers. The real problem was no one (who owned even a scrap of property) wanted the work since it was shitty, thankless, and didn't pay well. Slaves (and indentured servants) unlike a free man don't really get to complain, and they don't get to ask for a living wage so they were preferred. When it became near impossible to get idiots to sign up as indentured servants anymore they just switched to slaves wholesale. The work itself wasn't inherently bad (well I have heard stories of people getting nicotine poisoning from tobacco harvesting, but I'm not sure about their veracity), but since a slave who is not worked to their full potential is a bad investment they worked them as hard as they could and as they were property they generally treated them pretty shittilly.

>How would they remain nice and idyllic
In the real world, most inns are fairly nice, and this thread is supposed to be nicer then the real world.

>Implying you weren't talking about murder cults.
Okay Innsmouth.

You don't need to make everything dark to have conflict, or have an interesting setting.

My parties have never actually muder-hoboed a tavern, actually.

Even the minotaur barbarian who's trying to start a cult doesn't randomly kill people. He even gave a bunch of his food to the homeless once.

you're missing the point
first off, making things bad Just To Be Bad doesn't necessarily add 'depth', doesn't make a setting innately interesting, and nor does it actually make something you'll want to play in or care about - which is why this thread was started, in fact.
spoiler alert: you can have something good in a setting without that good just being a thin layer of wallpaper over a bastion of rusted shit.
second, nearly your entire post was dull and boring edge, the inn thing is just a great example of how hilariously little you're thinking any of this through, and how hilariously little you're actually reading what you're writing

>Yes, and when all strangers that come to that community strangely go missing. Because fuck "the others", amirite?
lel

>By sweeping their floor, cleaning their tables, doing the dishes, and hiring competent help. Like normal establishments in the service industry.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA....

I've worked restaurants. This literally only happens when it's the time of the year when health inspectors show up, if the owners think they can get away with it.

Have you seen Kitchen Nightmares?