Back to the D&D Basics - The Grand Duchy of Karameikos
07/09/2025
As part of my retro-gaming, I picked up a reprint of the D&D Gazetteer for the Grand Duchy of Karameikos. It's a handy book, with a good amount of information and proposed adventures.
Because it was designed to mate with other published modules, it even includes a handy guide to integrating them into the campaign.
The Gazetteer series was a setting in a box, if you will, and TSR cranked them out. Maybe it cranked too many out, because to a certain extent, the company was competing with itself.
At any rate the Gazetteers offered a unified world that was already put into D&D gaming stats. No assembly required.
The various kingdoms were obviously derived from medieval or other fantasy properties, but that only adds to their utility. Thus, the Grand Duchy is something of a stand-in for a Slavic nation colonized by Greco-Roman elites. The setting purposefully has an unfinished feel so that characters have plenty of room to established their own strongholds and engage in royal politics.
All of that is swell. There is even a discussion of coinage and how D&D oversells the use of gold, which tell me that author Aaron Alston knows a bit about history.
Alas, Alston also bought into the conventional 1980s scholarship that all accounts are unreliable and the truth is always different from what was written down. The book contains players' sections and referee sections, and there is always a difference.
What was most disappointing is that the "real" version of history is always more mundane. The players will hear of three god-like tribal founders, but then the Dungeon Master learns that it was all made up by the tribes as part of their mythical history.
This garbage has always pissed me off. How can anyone prove that? These are just secular historians with weird theories, not actual science. What makes it even worse is that this is a fantasy game! The whole point is to encounter legendary heroes, not use socio-economic data to explain the rise and fall of communities.
There are actual spells that allow high-ranking spell-users to contact the gods or other immortal creatures, so these "fake legends" would have been destroyed instantly. The rules for gods are similar - you can't pray to a myth and get your spells replenished. Someone has to have the power to answer the prayer.
This is what happens when secular wannabe scholars try to rationalize a world with goblins, giant spiders, dragons and rust monsters.
Is it useful? Very much so. I will probably buy more, but I will also make a point of always choosing the legend over some dim, gray "reality."