Creating the setting, part 1: The romance of the past

The generic European stone-and-sword  fantasy milieu, however imaginary, however insubstantial, has become cemented in the popular imaginations. This is what makes it work as an RPG, because an RPG relies on shared assumptions.  If the people playing the game cannot agree on a common vision of the setting, then it doesn't work.

Where does this come from? What do we expect out of a fantasy setting? What is it, really? I believe these questions are important and must be answered. Keep in mind that we, human beings, have a very limited cultural memory. If something is sufficiently old, old enough that our grandparents consider it old, we tend to assume it was that way forever.

Thus, the origin of the generic fantasy world does not stretch as far back in time as one might at first suppose. What we do know seems to be based on echoes of echoes, extrapolations from relatively recent times, probably no farther back than the late 1700's or early 1800's, when poets and writers became preoccupied with glorifying the pastoral, the homespun, the macabre, and the gothic.

A nostalgic sense of pan-Europeanism complemented the rise of romantic nationalism. There was a revival of national epics like Beowulf and the Faerie Queene (in England) or the Ring of the Niebelung and Faust (in what is now Germany). This was the time of steam-power, romantic poetry, clockwork, the agricultural revolution, and the machine-smashing Luddites.