Aug23
on August 23, 2016
Smell of Wine and Cheap Perfume
Music from the Middle Ages is for suckers anyway.
Anachronisms only work if everyone is on board. Like joke characters or pop culture references, anachronisms can take people right out of the game world, breaking immersion. Use with caution. But, often times, people don’t actually know what things were like historically. Medieval music and instruments are a blind spot for many, with semi-historical movies being the primary source of inspiration. Minstrels dancing while playing a lute and such. So our perceptions have a strong anachronistic slant.
It’s not like there’s a rule that all bards have to be lute-wielding, ditty-singing minstrels.
The Perform skill allows for all sorts of performance types to be used with bardic music. You can play a mandolin, or make like a satyr with a pan flute, or go for scary tribal drumming, or if you’re a bard/monk gestalt, mix Perform (Dance) with unarmed strikes to literally kick some butt with that one Russian dance.
Besides which, D&D, by default, has LOTS of races, and lots of cultures. And they are not all lute-wielders.
Dwarves could have their drums, elves could have their flutes, orcs their war chants, mind flayers could have some creepy dissonant techno-stuff, dragonborn could…
…
…What kind of music would dragonborn have, actually? I imagine them as being made up of scattered clans, each clan having a unique honor code to itself (so one clan might espouse kindness and hospitality, another courage and bravery, or maybe modesty and poverty, an evil clan might embrace greed and domination, et-cetera).
I suppose if they’re an honor-based culture, they might be like samurai, or noble houses of antiquity.
So…I dunno, archaic instruments? Drums, harp, chimes, that sort of thing? Right now I’m imagining the cymbals and drumming of one of those Chinese dragon dances…
What does everyone else think?