[coolsunglasses]

This post takes the way D&D is played today to be how Gary and his contemporaries played D&D and it leads them to the conclusion that D&D is the opposite of medieval.

As near as I can tell, patrons, village leaders, barons, and kings were very intentionally a part of the schema of a typical original D&D campaign. They used 1:1 time, players had multiple PCs, and you often led mercenaries into battle (cf. Chainmail rules being incorporated for this purpose)

What's weird is the author appears to be au fait with some of original D&D (they mention Chainmail), but then they make claims like:

>While you can create a barony, there is no way to level up and become a duke or King

I mean, you definitely could, but it's a question of what the scope of the campaign is meant to be. That's between the DM and the players. Just because Gary Gygax didn't address every possibility explicitly doesn't mean it was considered and assumed to happen in some campaigns.

>There’s no evidence for (or against) the idea that OD&D takes place in a dark age after a fallen Roman Empire analogue or during the death throes of a feudal kingdom.

The magic system of D&D is largely based on Jack Vance's Dying Earth series which is a post-apocalyptic and exhausted Earth set in the far future. Between that and the _sheer number of ruins littered all over the landscape_, I would tend to think that there's plenty of room for a DM to weave a background history of a fallen empire into their setting.

The author seems to expect Gary Gygax to have played the role of someone like Tolkien rather than what Gary Gygax actually was: a systems builder who was interested in designing systems for interactive games humans play together.

>The monster descriptions of “men”, “elves”, and “dwarves” don’t suggest that the game is set in a European culture.

What? Just because there are corsairs doesn't mean there isn't a strong Old World flavor to the elements of D&D's cast of cultures. Barbary pirates were a relevant force in European history.

>OD&D is meant to be setting-free. The game’s referee is to create his or her own campaign, ranging in milieu from the “prehistoric to the imagined future” (with emphasis on the medieval, especially for beginners).

This is an accurate statement.

What the author's saying here fits better for AD&D than it does OD&D. There's some insight and reasonable points about D&D not being Feudalism Simulator 2024 (play Dark Albion if you want that) but they take the idea further than the facts on the ground can bear.