Hecate Thinks about 6e D&D

D&D promulgates a fairly modern, liberal democratic attitude to its laws, usually on top of an idealised Western European quasi-Feudal society.  To say the two don't match is an understatement. Without doing a deep dive, you might like to consider how recently your country abolished slavery, and also made it illegal. The two are not synonymous - in the UK, slavery was abolished in 1833, but it wasn't actually made illegal until 2010. If someone owned slaves and came to the UK they were ok for 177 years... but now they face up to 14 years in prison. You might also like to look at the pattern of emancipation, that is giving people the right to vote. For example, in 1780 you had to own property (which didn't automatically mean you were a man, but inheritance laws and property laws made it very hard to be a woman and own property) worth £10 (£1,807 in today's money) but  before you think this is not a huge bar to voting, it should also be noted the electorate was actual...

I've picked the title world-planning, as distinct from world-building, because this isn't about building your own campaign directly, it's more about thinking about your setting in some general terms. That is, it's not about designing continents, cities, countries, NPCs, dungeons and the like, it's more about the philosophy of your world and how it all fits together. Take, for example, the long-espoused concept of PC exceptionalism. Weigh that against the relative ease that, as a DM, you can level a party from first to twentieth level using ONLY monsters that are humanoid from playable races. I'm not suggesting you should do this, but you certainly can do it. You can comfortably go from first to about thirteenth or so fighting only humans. Also consider, for a group of first level characters, if they encounter a pack of wolves of equal size four times, over the course of their life time, they'll reach second level. Five bandits and a bandit captain twice, eve...